Re: GTK on Windows

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

> I'm happy with this apps, but ...
> at the moment under system->software there are three GTK+ Libraries
> installed,

What is "system->software"? You mean the "system" subfolder of the
Windows folder? There should be no GTK+ there. (And not in system32
either.) If there is, some installer is doing a very ugly thing and
needs to have its wrists slapped.

> And what about the GTK+ apps bundled with their own gtk in their own folders.

That is the how it should be.

> And wich gtk library does a certain application use when i start it now.

Unless some badly written application installer puts the GTK+ stack
DLLs in the system32 or system folder under the windows folder, each
application uses the GTK+ stack bundled with it. Either by having the
GTK+ stack DLLs in the same folder as the application's exe file, or
by using a registry entry that makes the application's exe files use
GTK+ from a specific location.

As there is no centralized package management (as in a Linux machine
running a specific distro), each application packager in effect is a
different "distro" that distributes the version of GTK+ (and other
3rd-party libraries) that they know fits their application. GTK+ is
from Windows's point of view a 3rd-party library.

> From the view of a user this is realy confusing.

Huh? A typical Windows user or a GTK-using application does not and
should not need to know what GTK+ is, and that the application uses
it, or that on a Linux box there is just one system-managed GTK+
installation.

It's people with some experience of Linux that have the misguided
conception that Open Source packages on Windows should somehow be
installed like they are on Linux, i.e. system-wide, and thus find it
confusing that there can in fact be several installations of some
3rd-party library, one per application that bundles it.

> It would be really nice to have a standardized gtk installer.

Why not start the discussion with something more basic, like zlib? How
many copies of zlib code do you think exist on a Windows machine with
a typical mix of freely available software installed? Firefox includes
it, it's in OpenOffice.org, and surely in a bunch of other widely used
software. (Presumably it is in some disguise also in Windows itself,
even if the zlib API as such is not offered as a public documented API
by Windows.) Ditto for libjpeg, libpng, expat perhaps, etc. Now, once
you have convinced these projects to have a standardized installers
for these libraries, let's get back to GTK+...

> And if an application bundles it's gtk library with it's installer, the
> installer should be able to check if there is already
> a library installed and which version.

Trust me, this just doesn't work. It is less pain if each application
(or each person/company having control of their own installer(s))
bundles an own copy.

> The other problem with gtk on Windows is, that a lot of people tell me, that
> it still looks alien on the window platform.

Have you tried using the ms-windows theme?

--tml